Tag: Platform

For those of you who do not know, Microsoft’s Web Application Proxy (WAP) is a reverse HTTPS proxy used for redirecting HTTPS requests from multiple incoming domains (or subdomains) to internal servers. it does however not handle HTTP at any point, which is a failure in itself, I mean it would not be hard to add a part of the system where if enabled it redirects HTTP to HTTPS itself, rather than having to use a workaround, come on Microsoft stay on the ball here, but I digress.

As I stated the main issue here is it does not within the WAP itself redirect a HTTP request to the equivalent HTTPS address. I have played with multiple possible solutions for this including a Linux server running Apache 2 using PHP to read the requested URL and redirect it to the HTTPS equivalent. None of these however have the simple elegance of this solution which includes the HTTP to HTTPS redirect on the same box as the WAP system itself.

First of all you need to log into the WAP server and install the Internet Information Services role. Once done open the management console and you should get a window similar to below.

Now navigate to the required server by clicking on it, and on the right hand side click “Get New Web Platform Components”.

This will open a new web browser window as shown below, when it does simply select “Free Download”.if you have issues with not being able to download the file due to a security warning, you should see the earlier blog here to see how to enable the downloads. Download and install the software via your chosen method.

Once it is installed a new page will appear, this is the main splash page of the Web Platform Installer

Using the search box (which at the time of writing, using Web Platform Installer 5.0, is in the top right hand corner) search for the word “Rewrite”. This will then display a “URL Rewrite” result with the version number appended to the end (which at time of writing this article is 2.0) and click the “Add” button to the right of the highlighted “URL Rewrite” line,

This will change the text on the button to “Remove” and activate the “Install” button the the lower right of the screen, click the install button.

Clicking this install button will bring up a licensing page, click the “I Accept” button (assuming of course you do accept the T’s & C’s)

You will then get an install progress page

Which will change to a completed page after it is done, so click the “Finish” button in the lower right hand corner

This will drop you back to the same original splash screen of the Web Platform Installer, click “Exit”

You will now need to close and re-open the IIS Manager and reselect the server you were working on. You should now see two new options, the first being “Web Platform Installer” which we do not need to concern ourselves with any further, the second is “URL Rewrite”,

Double click on “URL Rewrite” and open up the URL Rewrite management console, on the right hand side of this console in the “Actions” pane, click “Add Rule”.

This opens up a box of possible rewrite rules, what we want to create is an “Inbound Rule” as our requests are coming into the server from an external source. Select “Blank Rule” and click the “OK” button

In the new page that opens, in the “Name” field type the name that you want to give the rule, I use and suggest HTTP to HTTPS Redirect, as this tells you exactly what it does at a glance

In the next section, “Match URL” set “Requested URL” to “Matches the Pattern” (default), “Using” to “Regular Expressions” (default) and most importantly “Pattern” to “(.*)” (without the quotes). I suggest you take this opportunity to test the pattern matching.

In the “Conditions” section, ensure that the “Logical grouping” is set to “Match All” (default) and click the “Add” button.

In the new box that appears enter the following, in the “Condition input” field type “{HTTPS}” (again without the quotes, and yes those are curly braces, not brackets). Change the “Check if input string” dropdown to “Matches the Pattern” and in the “Pattern” box below type “^OFF$” (again, no quotes), and “Ignore case” should be checked. With this one I do not suggest testing the pattern, as even though this system works fine for me, this test ALWAYS fails. Click the “OK” button (mine is not highlighted here as I had already clicked it away and had to re-open the box)

This will take you back to the new rule screen, check the conditions match as shown and then we can move on.

This is the part where we now tell it what we want to do when it matches the previous conditions, in the Action pane change the “Action type” to “Redirect”, Set the “Redirect URL” to “https://{HTTP_HOST}/{R:1}” (again, they are curly braces and of course no quotes), you can select whether “Append query string” is checked or not, but I highly recommend leaving it checked, as if someone has emailed out a URL with a query on it, but not put in the protocol headers (http:// and https:// being the ones we are concerned about) we want the query string to be appended to the end of the redirected URL so they end up where they intended to be. Finally make the “Redirect type” dropdown read “Permanent (301)” (default).

Restart the server service for good measure and there you have it you now have HTTP being redirected to HTTPS which in theory at least is on the same server. Ensure that you have ports 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS) redirected from your router to the server and the firewalls (and any other intermediaries) on both the router and server set to allow the traffic as required